In an apparatus for playing back content containing video and audio data, a displacement may occur between the playback time of the video data and the playback time of the audio data, for example, due to such factors as the difference between the transmission time of encoded video data and the transmission time of encoded audio data. To address this, there have been proposed techniques for synchronizing the video and audio data so that the playback time of the video data matches the playback time of the audio data (for example, refer to Japanese Laid-open Patent Publication No. 2003-204492).